Reaqtor - Reliable Rx at Scale for High-performance Event Processing

.NET Oxford

The Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) is one of the most influential technologies to have emerged from the .NET ecosystem. (Its influence on other platforms has been so pervasive that its origins in .NET are sometimes forgotten.)

The team that created Rx did not rest on their laurels: they used Rx as the basis for developing a distributed, reliable, and extremely scalable event processing service. Reactor, as it was then called, has been integral to some of Microsoft's most widely used services for many years, including Cortana and Office 365, but although Microsoft has talked in public about it a few times, it has never been available for use outside of Microsoft—until now.

On May 18th 2021, Bart de Smet, made Reaqtor (its new name) open source, as a .NET-Foundation-sponsored project.

This talk will explain what makes Reaqtor different from other high-scale event processing systems. It will also show some of the foundational components that have been released as part of this, most notably 'Bonsai', a mechanism for serializing computations based on .NET's expression tree system, and which is central to how Reaqtor works.